Water main breaks exceed 100 per year

While the report acknowledged that physically assessing thousands of miles of underground pipes is unrealistic, auditors called for a periodic assessment, aided by software, to serve as a road map for which sections to replace first.

“I think it’s important to understand that most of our assets are buried and you can’t see them, unlike a street,” said assistant utilities director Jim Fisher. “If you want to assess the condition of a street, you can walk the street or drive the street.”

The city is under mandate from the state Department of Public Health to replace at least 10 miles of cast-iron water main per year, and the department says it is meeting its requirements.

The city has replaced about 51 miles of the most rupture-prone cast iron pipes with PVC pipe since 2007, with 129 miles to go by 2017.

The city says its replacement schedule is fine and points out that the city’s water loss is a tiny percentage of the billions of gallons it successfully delivers to customers every year.

“We have an aggressive and successful approach to maintaining the city’s water infrastructure,” said Alex Roth, spokesman for Mayor Jerry Sanders.

He noted San Diego’s water-loss rate was 9.3% for the last fiscal year, lower than the national average of 14 percent for “unaccounted for” water. According to a city report, the rate for Phoenix was 5 percent; Philadelphia 31 percent; San Francisco was 9 percent.

Local environmental attorney Marco Gonzalez said just because other cities are losing a lot of water doesn’t make it OK.

“It is unfathomable that any city in the arid southwest would see any amount of systemic water loss as acceptable,” Gonzalez said. “Between recent droughts, pressures on the Colorado River system, decreased flows available from Northern California, and the unknown short and long term impacts of global climate change, the only question we should be asking is ‘how do we do better.’… Losing that much water from main breaks should cause a lot of concern.”

Bailey, the utilities director, called water loss a very complicated and expensive problem with no single solution.

“We have replaced over 35,000 meters over last four years. Unaccounted for water loss has remained the same,” Bailey said. “What it says to me is there are many moving parts to this issue... Every leak we can detect we will fix. Every meter we’ll fix. It cannot and will not guarantee there will not be leaks in the system.”

Fisher said the city considers myriad factors when figuring out which mains to replace and when, such as pressure flows, the age of the pipe, the material of the pipe, complaints and break history.

He added that the city has to figure out how to maintain water service for residents while replacing old pipes, unlike resurfacing a street.

City officials have calculated the cost of deferred maintenance and capital needs for streets to be about $840 million, but they have made no similar calculations for water infrastructure. The auditor’s report said the department needs to “estimate deferred maintenance and unfunded needs” so that ratepayers are clear on consequences of deferring projects.